Police in Lagos told AFP Wednesday they have released two dogs after failing to find evidence they had been transformed from children by witchcraft.
A police unit in the Oko-Oba, Agege, district of the city last month detained 13 members of a vigilante gang who had beaten up and were about to lynch a man after rumors he had used magic to turn two missing schoolchildren into dogs.
After some fighting, they detained the mob, the beaten-up man and the dogs and held all of them for investigation.
Asked at the time why the dogs were being held, Lagos State police spokesman Victor Chilaka said: "There was an incident. We do not know quite what happened so we are detaining all of them."
Earlier this month, all the detainees were released, Chilaka said Wednesday.
"Nobody could actually testify to having seen the man turn the children into dogs. Everyone said they had heard it from someone, who had heard it from someone and so on," he said.
A police investigation had shown that the man, an ethnic Hausa from northern Nigeria, was a professional dog seller and had around 100 dogs, all ear-tagged, at his compound in Lagos, in southwest Nigeria.
"He took us to where the dogs are kept and he showed us the marks on them. They are the same as the marks on those brought to the police command," Chilaka said.
The police released the 13 members of the mob and the beaten-up man, the spokesman said. "We released the dogs to the man for want of evidence of any wrongdoing," Chilaka said.
The dog owner had accepted an apology on behalf of the mob.
Belief in witchcraft, including the power of humans to turn into animals and plants and to transform or remove body parts at will is widespread in Nigeria and such incidents are regularly reported in the press.
Critics say that often the alleged culprit turns out to come from an ethnic or social minority and to have been picked on by the mob who then accuse him or her of witchcraft.
The witchcraft accusation is just a shaggy dog story, in fact -- LAGOS (AFP)
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